


Never such innocence, never before or since

by JustRosey



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Charlie goes to war, Post-Series, World War II, Wow I think this is the first thing I have ever written without using Tommy's name, angsty, introspection of his relationship with Tommy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:15:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26746480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustRosey/pseuds/JustRosey
Summary: [Charlie Shelby's PoV]Title taken from Philip Larkin's poem MCMXIV
Relationships: Charlie Shelby & Tommy Shelby, Tommy Shelby/Lizzie Stark
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	Never such innocence, never before or since

I always thought it would be a way to make him proud of me.  
I didn’t know why there was nothing but disappointment in his eyes.

-

Lizzie had sat down in one of the lounge chairs, her hands tightly clasping the edges of the seat.  
“God, Charlie… Why? You don’t have t-”

Ruby had eyed the door since he’d stormed out on us. On me.  
She only made about a half step before her mother interfered.

“Stay here, Ruby.”

She stayed reluctantly.

“Because I want to,” I answered bluntly to the earlier question of ‘why’. “I want to fight for my country.”

A lie. I really wasn’t so sure of that.  
School had always been hard with all the other boys from the good houses. Every single one better than mine of course. In the teacher’s eyes too.  
(Sometimes I felt like all these people knew my father better than I did.)  
If the other soldiers would be anything like the boys at school I was certain I didn’t want to go.

“I am 18 and I will be finishing school in a month. After that I will join the Armed Forces.”

I looked to the door myself now, as if he’d been listening from there and would come back inside now. Changed his mind or something. Why couldn’t he be proud of his son trying to be a man?

-

Truth is, I never really knew my father at all, did I?  
I remember feeling strangely nervous and self-conscious whenever he was around. Even more so the few and far between times he would actually be alone with me.  
He never hit me, never threatened to do so either.  
He yelled at me once, when I was being difficult about one of the horses he had had to kill.

Sometimes death is a kindness.

The words have stuck with me. Arthur got them mixed up, but I heard father say them before he went away. He always does that. Just ride off and not come back for days.  
Actually, now that I think about it…  
(I was quite ill one dreadful January years ago; ill enough for the school to send me home.  
Funny, how I caught the cold in the first place because some of the boys splashed a bucket of water at me before locking me out of our dorm at night and none of the teachers thought punishment was necessary. They did have the decency to look guilty when father himself came to pick me up. They couldn’t even look me in the eyes. I triumphed even in my feverish haze back then.)  
… however. I was going to say that it’s not true I have never felt close to him. He sat by my bed for I don’t know how many nights after bringing me home sick. No matter what Lizzie whispered to him, he never left. Didn’t speak either but he was there.  
I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a small, red glow by the window at the far end of my bedroom. He didn’t even leave to smoke a fag but had the decency to smoke out of the window.  
I felt at ease with his quiet presence those nights.  
It comforted me.  
I felt safe.

He’s more of a guard dog than a father anyways.  
But guard dogs make you feel safe after all.

He never held my hand during those nights; if he felt my forehead and cheek for a fever I barely felt his hand touch my skin.  
I always wondered how he and uncle Arthur, those big, bad men, who’ve seen the Great War and have been fighting their own never-ending war since they were even younger than me, could have the most gentle, feather-light touches. If you’ve seen either of their hands, you shouldn’t think it possible.  
Ruby had had a thing for playing with his hand when she was little. She’d compare her small hand to his, palm to palm, line up their fingers and giggle at how small hers was in comparison. He hated that. His whole posture went stiff and I could count down the seconds until he’d excuse himself, pry his daughter off of him and leave, announcing he had business to attend to.  
I hate the word business.

But I do understand now that sometimes horses have to die.

Ruby still has it better anyways.  
She has a mother and she makes him be a father to her. Always has.  
There’s something she knows and hasn’t ever bothered to tell me.  
About how to get to him.  
She always just took his hand; no invitations needed.  
Foolish boy I was would’ve probably asked him if I could-

We both like horses, just like him, but he takes Ruby on rides. Not me.  
Lizzie says he doesn’t since I fell off the first horse he bought me and broke my arm.  
I was eight and up on the ‘orse again a week later. Albeit without him watching of course.

We’re the only two men in Arrow House, him and me, but he’s never remotely treated me like a man since my birthday. If anything, he speaks to me even less now.  
He didn’t come back for a week after I told them I’d enlisted. The subject, as well as my person altogether were being ignored entirely. It didn’t feel much different to any other time really.

-

I know he’s sick.  
Lizzie will say he’s seen a doctor already and most days she will deny my suggested diagnoses and Ruby’s suspicions for all our sake, but some days she sits at the breakfast table with the vacant gaze of a sleepless night and he’ll never come downstairs.  
It’s funny how he’s never really there when he’s actually at the table-

(“Still eats like the poor man he once was.”  
That maid was fired by Lizzie about an hour later.)

-but when he’s not there it’s like a big, black hole has taken his place. No one really talks about it but everyone is painfully aware of it.

“It’s just a headache. Bad ‘un,” she’ll tell the maids clearing his unused place, and they all nod, not believing a single word she says.

Last month, he was in bed for 17 days straight and three more individual days.  
I counted.  
Lizzie’s the only one he’ll allow inside their bedroom then, and I’ll sit in the hallway with my books and study for my finals, cause if the maids see me sitting there they don’t try to listen.  
His coughs are hard to overhear though, even from the landing of the stairs.

I’ve always known my father to have headaches. Lizzie said he was injured and has ever since had them. When I asked if it happened in the war she just shook her head.  
Headaches don’t cause coughing fits though as far as I know.

Ruby can’t stand the house when he’s sick, and Lizzie hates it when she resurfaces from his cave to me telling her she’s gone out on a ride on her own again.  
She worries, Lizzie does.  
For both Ruby and me, and I hold her in high regards for that. She did never try to replace the mother I do not remember, but she was never less than a mother to me either.  
I see why father places so much trust in women.  
They are less likely to fail him than the men he has had around him all his life. Sometimes I wonder if my mother failed him more than he failed her.

I hate their old bedroom. Still the way it always was, or so Frances told me once.  
He never goes there. I guess he just needs to know that he could and that it would still look the same.

I know Lizzie worries for my father too.

-  
“You will not go. I do not allow it.”

“I believe it’s not your decision to make anymore.”

“I’m-”

“My father, yes, but since I have turned 18 my life is my own.”

I could see how that hurt some small, sensitive residue of a heart capable of feelings in him. It made me want to keep going and poke and prod at it until it’d break open and bleed like a nasty blister of some sort. I'd made up my mind. I wanted this now. I was not going to be the rich child in the big house for long anymore. I'd always been less than that really, and now I was going to be more. A soldier.

“I will defend my country, because now there is still enough of it left unbombed to be worth it. If the young men do not rise up and take up arms to safe us from the looming evil trying to cross over to us, what will become of England and its people?”

“You listen to too many speeches on the radio-”

“Shut up, Ruby!”

Lizzie’s mouth opened, but she didn’t rebuke me for my words. When the room was silent again, I continued.

“I do not have a wife or children to leave behind. My adult life has only started now, and I would rather sacrifice it so other families are safe, than sit here, wait for terror to arrive, maybe fall in love and start my own family to finally have to witness it all going up in smoke and ashes when it is too late. I want to stop that from happening and lucky for all of you, most young men in this country think alike. No matter where they come from. We are all united and equal-”

Father snorted a laugh and looked away from me, shaking his head. I despised him in that moment.

“-equal in our strive for a better future without the horrors of war and destruction, far from the battlefield even. This must stop. But if no one is willing to put up a fight, it won’t.”

I realised I was out of breath after my speech, but I had made my point.

He was looking at me again now.  
Blue eyes scratching at my defiant surface, seeing a small, weak boy, I was sure of that. I hated him so much in that moment, and even more so when he got up from his chair behind the desk and stood in front of me.  
(I am taller than my father; have been ever since I was 16, but there’s no one quite like him. Capable of reducing men in front of him to mice. Looking down on their miserable existence, while he really has to look up at them. If dangerous men become mice in front of him, I was the size of an ant right then.)

I broke the eye contact.  
Have never been too good at holding it with anyone. It simply feels unnatural to stare into someone’s eyes for too long. If you stare into my father’s eyes for too long, God knows what will happen to you.

He lifted my chin and made me look at him again.

“You don’t understand.”

A man of many words as always. My anger started to show. Lizzie said my eyes get this look.  
Half-lidded, unblinking.  
She said I look like my mother then.  
Good, if it would only get through to him once, for fuck’s sake.

“I’m not uncle Arthur or one of your men. You can bark orders at me all you like, but I decide.”

If he was shocked, he didn’t let it show. His gaze was still dissecting me right there in his office, sunlight streaming in from the windows making his eyes seem translucent.  
Uncle Arthur and Auntie Ada have different eyes.  
Polly once said my grandfather beat my father up as a kid, just because he didn’t like his eyes. I can understand that somehow.

“I explain orders to my men.” he said into the silence of the room. “Or to Arthur.”

He took a step back, picked up the recruitment form that had arrived in the post this morning from his desk.  
He ripped it apart.  
Then he sat back down in his chair, lit a cigarette, looked at me, stood there with my mouth hanging open, and said:

“I don’t want you to understand.”

-

I moved to Auntie Ada and my cousin Elisabeth for the months I was in training.  
She was worried but at least she never tried to stop me. Karl had been gone for almost a year at that point, and I knew she barely slept at night, sick with worry about him.

He was killed during the first month I spent in service.  
I couldn’t stop crying when I heard about it.  
Truth is, the nights I didn’t cry were rare in my first months there.

Lizzie wrote.  
Every week a letter arrived from her and Ruby. He never signed his name with theirs. I was too proud to ask after him in the letters I returned.  
I wrote to Auntie Ada too. I told her how afraid I was and asked her to promise me to not tell my family. I felt like she could understand in a way. Through losing Karl.

It was late Autumn, when Lizzie’s letters said that he was sick again. Come to think of it now, it was the first time she mentioned him at all in her letters.

By December, she barely wrote about anything else.

He was worse than ever apparently and not getting better.  
When I was offered to leave and go home for Christmas, I hesitated but accepted in the end. I didn’t want to go home only to have to come back.  
But I knew I couldn’t forgive myself if I wouldn’t be there if he-

I announced I’d be home for Christmas only about a week before the occasion.

My thoughts were spiralling as I got off the train in Birmingham. I’d shaved on the small toilet on the train because I’d forgotten to in the morning, and I’d sliced my cheek for a lack of attention. I couldn’t stand to look at my reflection these days.  
So, as I was turning towards the exit of the station, I was expecting to hire a cab to take me to Warwickshire.  
I did however not expect them to be there.

Ruby lunged forward, attaching herself to me, Lizzie towering behind her, tears in her eyes.  
I felt numb.  
Her tears, Ruby’s excitement.  
It couldn’t find its way to my core and touch me. I stood still as if waiting for the order to climb the ladders.

The hand on my shoulder brought me back.

He was at my right side, shielded by Ruby’s head resting against my neck. I squinted. He couldn’t be here. It was not like him to-

Ruby let go and I saw he was in fact here.

Something.  
In that small moment of realisation.  
He was here.  
I could feel my knees turning to pudding and my eyes threatened to spill.

He looked at me.

I’d seen myself in the mirror this morning.

For the first time in my life, I could see that I was his son indeed.  
Two gaunt faces looking at each other, looking at themselves.  
Sunken eyes, skin stretched on too high cheekbones, bottom lips just pronounced enough to always look a childish pout.  
He was too fucking thin to not have come off that train like myself.  
The men on the front had more meat on them-  
He pulled me into a hug when he realised I couldn’t look at him anymore.

I cried like a little boy.

“Forgive me, Charlie.”

-

I know now.  
He was never disappointed in me.  
My father was disappointed he couldn’t save me from what I was going to see.

Though I understand now that sometimes horses have to die, I also know my father did not speak of Dangerous back then.

**Author's Note:**

> Would mean a lot to me if you told me what you think...  
> Thanks for reading!


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